


keys

by x (ordinary)



Series: 31 Days of Apex [1]
Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: Alcohol, Alzheimer's Disease, Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:22:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25029211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ordinary/pseuds/x
Summary: Elliott sits alone at his bar with only his memories to keep him company.Unfortunately.
Series: 31 Days of Apex [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1823794
Kudos: 13





	keys

Elliott lays his face flat against the cool metal of the counter, eyes already at half mast. His bravado and charm slide away like raindrops streaking across a window, leaving him hollow.

He’s so, so tired-- has been since his dinner break. Flying solo for the last leg of the night meant that he couldn’t exactly duck out early, and he’s really not the type of boss to call someone up and say “hey, actually, about that day off of yours, wouldn’t it be a shame if something happened to it.”

Besides! Normally it would be fine. He’s worked double shifts all his life, be it as a humble tech repair guy or running the bar solo. 

Normally, he wouldn’t be sitting on a stool, staring down the melting ice in an old fashioned. The bottle of bourbon is still at the ready beside it. Still open. Just in case. 

It’s not a _common_ thing, okay. Elliott doesn’t have a problem with getting into his cups. Having a drink here and there has never been a problem to or _for_ him--

But even he has to admit that some shots on the job with a wink at your patrons or cocktails with your friends don’t have quite the same ring as drinking alone in the dark.

The last stragglers have been gone a while, although he doesn’t bother to check the time to find out how long. The doors are firmly locked, and all that’s waiting for him is a trip up the stairs to his apartment above the lounge-- or, if he’s feeling less lazy, hailing a red-eye ship and heading back to the compound in preparation for tomorrow’s game. 

He does neither of these things. Instead, Elliott runs a calloused finger along the rim of his glass, and thinks.

Dinner had been fast-- Molly’s shift ended soon, so it was a grab and go kinda day. His favorite curry place was just down the street, a little joint with minimal outdoor seating right next to a stall, and that’s where he’d seen them.

An older woman-- her 70s, probably, not that he’d ever guess such a thing to a lady’s face-- shoulder to shoulder with two young men on either side of her. And they were laughing, the kind that rings out like a clear bell, cutting through the crowded sounds of Solace City during dinner rush. They shared a resemblance that was impossible to ignore. It showed in their kinked hair and their nose, the warm brown of their skin, gleaming beneath golden lights.

She was spinning a tale, he heard, shifting from one foot to the other as he waited in line. From the corner of his eyes, Elliott watched her gesticulate with her steady hands, and he knew her eyes would be bright if he were able to see them.

Clear. Warm. Full of recognition.

Full of love.

Normally he’d stick around and strike up a conversation with anyone who’d hear him with an easy smile and a stumbled hello. Regulars knew him, of course, and besides, who didn’t, once they got a look at him?

Mirage, beloved Apex Legend! Mirage, repping the Solace City pride. Mirage, full of life.

Not something listless and numb. So he turned tail, opting to take his dinner in the back room of the bar, eyes staring holes into the yellow curry that tasted like sawdust on his clever tongue.

Elliott pulls out his phone, setting it on the counter beside the drink that he downs in a mouthful. Mom’s still his lockscreen, with her graying hair tied into a plait and her gaze up at a younger Elliott full of a mother’s love. He’d been barely 20, then. Before the war ended. and before--

He pulls the bourbon closer. Its glass is dewy with condensation.

“She got it early, you know,” Elliott says to the bottle, and his tone is as though he’s speaking to an old friend. Not conspiratorial, but confiding. His words are too loud in the silence. “The disease. I ever tell you that? The doc said it’s not supposed to, you know, really _kick in_ till you’re older. We’re talking like, sixty five, seventy kind of older.”

He takes a pull, and it burns in a way he hates. In the moment, Elliott extends that hate to himself, pulling it inward like an iron maiden’s spikes closing in around him.

"But that’s how old she is now. Sixty five, about on the dot. In, you know. Three weeks or so. It was diffe-difful--hard. After the war. To, you know. Really... notice the signs. Because grief makes you do kinda funny, kinda fucked up stuff. I just thought she’d, thought she’d gotten a little. Forgetful. That’s how it goes, right?"

He laughs and it hurts. Steel wool in his throat. He coughs, clearing it. “Well. That’s not really how it went.” 

He can’t say the next part out loud, because it fills him with shame incalculable. He is dwarfed by the vastness of it, the darkness that swallows up all light it might see.

The awful truth he ricochets between have made peace with and never forgiving himself for:

His brothers would have known something was wrong. 

A loud crack of thunder outside jolts him back into his skin, heart thudding rabbit-fast in his chest. He rubs his hands over his face, soliloquy concluded with the most graceless of curtain calls.

He takes one last drink from the bottle and caps it, taking it by its neck to take with him back upstairs like he might a prospective lover, but then--

Elliott jerks, turning to stare at the door. 

He can’t remember if he actually locked it for the life of him. He was _sure_ he had, but the memory of its actually is absent. Null. A void.

No one’s tried to get in... but maybe that’s just because it’s lights off, no one’s home. So where had he put the keys? 

Elliott checks his pockets. Not there. Checks his _other_ pockets. Not there, but what _is_ there is a familiar roll of nausea in his belly alongside the drink.

Where are they? Where are they.

The doors across the room stand in the silence and the dark, mocking him. If he checks them, it’s admitting defeat. If he checks them, it’s a confession. He steadies himself against the bar, closing his eyes tightly.

Think. _Think_. Not a big deal. Just a long, long day. A long day full of thinking about his mom. A long day full of wanting to go home to a home that no longer exists.

Elliott takes in one breath, then another, and turns on a heel. He is going to trust his memory. He is going to march upstairs. He is going to _lay down_ and moisturize and get some well deserved beauty sleep because his looks don’t come for free. 

He’ll find his keys in the morning, wherever they are in the bar. 

Things will be okay. 

“This is your fault,” he hisses to the bottle, shaking it a little as he puts one weary footstep after another. “If you hadn’t distracted me, I wouldn’t be in this mess. Shows me for trying to make a friend.”

Elliott does not think of his decoys, and what they might say. They may be twice as shallow but just as beautiful, but at the end of the day, they’re still him. Faces that are the wrong shape for what he wants to see, with voices too brash, too loud. Sending a part of him out to stare him down as he drinks alone at the counter-- well.

It’s funny-- and a little sad-- that some bourbon might be a better listener.

When his skincare routine is done-- all ten steps of it-- Elliott lets himself fall into his neatly made bed. He does not think of the doors. He does not think of his mom.

He does not think of anything at all.

(In the morning, a nice older woman in her 70s will bring him his keys to his unlocked door.)

**Author's Note:**

> this is close to my chest because alzheimer’s runs in my family and my dad had it early onset, which is genetic. i constantly wonder if my own memory problems could be related.
> 
> god i hope i got the timeline right


End file.
